4. Robert Hamerton-Kelly,
sermon
from October 21, 2001 (Woodside Village Church).

Reflections and Questions

1. There's a lot of talk about forgiveness, which has been a
matter of much debate in our culture to begin with. Should those
who have been grievously harmed -- survivors of sexual abuse, for
example -- be expected to forgive their offenders? Can white
colonialism be forgiven for slavery or its genocide against native
peoples? (See Walter Wink's recent book, When the
Powers Fall: Reconciliation in the Healing of Nations.) And
how should our forgiveness of each other be distinguished from
God's forgiveness for us? Can we truly be expected to forgive as
graciously as God forgives?

With much debate of the subject, one of the most rejected phrases
currently is the maxim "forgive and forget." When one comes to the
point of forgiveness and reconciliation, it does not mean
forgetting the offense. It means forgiving and reconciling in
spite of the offense.

I think that a Girardian view on the matter would support the
latter position. James Alison speaks of The Joy of Being Wrong; in
other words, joy comes precisely through not forgetting but
through knowing how much we are forgiven as we come to see the
depth of our sin. Gil Bailie has been especially clear in
emphasizing the fact that aleitheia, the Greek word for
"truth," literally means to "stop forgetting." Part of the
delusion of our sinfulness is to help us forget the resentment and
violence that stands at the center of both our fallen selves and
our sacred cultures. The cross becomes our means to stop
forgetting. It is the truth that sets us free (John 8). It is why
Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. All other religions and
philosophies, including Christianity to the extent that it becomes
a religion of the sacred, are part of the cover-up. Yes, they can
come to have many positive aspects of creativity and community,
but these very positive elements can be the central means for
covering-up and keeping us in the delusion that we haven't
hopelessly fallen into resentment and violence. That is why the
resentment and violence never completely leave us, but continues
to jump up and bite us, in spite of our valiant efforts at
thinking ourselves civilized, cultured, and full of "creative
spirituality." The only way out of the "eternal return" of the
resentment and violence is to stop forgetting. The only way is
through the Cross.

The question, then, is whether Jeremiah might have slightly
missed the mark, slightly overstated the matter, by making
forgiveness a matter of God's forgetting. God's remembering our
sin no more might be a powerful way to state the matter of
forgiveness, but does it end up being misleading? Does Jeremiah's
theology of forgiveness in 31:31-34 conflict with Jesus'
liberating truth in John 8, where Jesus won't let the Jewish
leaders forget that we have followed a father who is the essence
of the Lie and a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44)? In fact,
as Jesus stands before Pilate, about to be sentenced to the Cross,
he once again states his mission: "For this I was born, and for
this I came into the world, to testify to the truth." (John 18:37)
In other words, Jesus came into this world that we might finally
stop forgetting. No, forgiveness doesn't come through God's
forgetfulness; it comes through God's gracious love that both
leads us into stopping to forget and, in doing so, helping us to
finally begin to get beyond the resentment and violence. It comes
through the Son who can speak a word of forgiveness even from the
Cross, not in forgetfulness of it.

2. Since writing the above reflections on forgiveness, there have
been at least two further significant insights. The first involves
Jesus’ speaking a word of forgiveness from the Cross. It might be
significant to note that Jesus does not directly forgive his
persecutors. He doesn’t say, “I forgive you.” He prays, “Father,
forgive them...” As human beings, there are times when we might
have trouble being able to directly forgive our persecutors. At
those times, can we at least come to turn it over to God? It might
even be to confess to God that we cannot forgive them, while
allowing for the possibility that God might be able to and want
to.

There might also be something about the indirectness of Jesus’
prayer for forgiveness that is more gracious to those who are in
position to receive it. James Alison, in his recent book On Being Liked (ch. 3,
“Re-imagining forgiveness: victory as reconciliation”), speaks
about how sometimes a direct forgiveness can be used as vengeance,
or at least taken that way. There are situations in which it is
very difficult to say a direct “I forgive you” without seeming
smug or condescending, even if we are genuine about it. What’s
worse is that we can often actually intend it as a smug and
condescending statement -- in which case, it has become an
act of vengeance, not forgiveness. So perhaps, as his persecutors
stand mocking him, Jesus’ prayer to God is, at that moment, the
most gracious way that he can speak a word of forgiveness.

3. The other important insight around forgiveness for me has come
from those who talk about nonviolence as radical nonretaliation.
This raises the question for me, “What is the opposite of
forgiveness?” Isn’t it vengeance? And so isn’t forgiveness, first
of all, an act of nonretaliation in a situation that usually calls
forth vengeance? To forgive is to relinquish the desire for
retaliation and vengeance. And so there is an important respect in
which nonviolence and forgiveness are the same thing. They both
involve radical nonretaliation.

Romans 3:19-28

Exegetical Notes

1. The Greek dik words abound in this passage, appearing
10 times: once for the adjective hypodikos (v. 19, most
often translated as "accountable"); 4 times for the verb dikaioō
(vs. 20, 24, 26, 28, most often translated as "justify"); 4 times
for the noun dikaiosynē (vs. 21, 22, 25, 26, most often
translated as "righteousness"); and once for the adjective dikaios
(v. 26, most often translated as "righteous"). Thus it is
difficult to translate all these dik words in a way that
makes clear they are all related. There are those who choose
"righteousness" for the noun dikaiosynē and then "make
right" or "declare right" for the verb dikaioō, the
latter more often being translated as the crucial Reformation term
"justify." So another choice for dikaiosynē to be
consistent with "justify" would be to translate it as "justice." Louis
Martyn in his groundbreaking commentary on Galatians
chooses an older option in English, "rectification" and "rectify."

My preference is to translate all the dik words with the
root "just," making the noun and verb "justice" and "justify,"
respectively. The adjective dikaios is simply "just." More
difficult is the adjective hypodikos, "accountable." To
keep the "just" root word, I would suggest the phrase "brought to
justice," or "under judgment." Note: the rather common Greek word
adikos, often translated simply as "evil," in keeping with
my practice here would be translated as "unjust" -- which it
usually is in its only occurrence in Romans, at 3:5. (Misleading
in this regard is to translate adikos as "dishonest"
[NRSV] in Luke's parable of the dismissed steward, Luke 16:10-11.)

2. ho nomos, "the law," and ergon nomos, "works
of the law." In Paul's own Aramaic/Hebrew tongue he would be
speaking here of Torah, which is more than mere "law,"
especially in our now secular understandings of the word. Prior to
modern secularism, Paul's understanding of "law" was entirely
religious. In fact, in many respects Torah for him simply meant
the Jewish religion. He may have been using ho nomos in a
manner more generally than Torah, but certainly Torah represented
for Paul the full stature, the epitome, of human law. And
remember, again, that law in the ancient world was bound up with
religion.

Similarly, for "works of the law." Paul is talking about
religious practice. In the specific context of Romans and
Galatians, we see Paul's argument against a 'Judaizing' Teacher in
Galatia and Rome as specifically against making Gentile converts
to take up all the practices of the Jewish religion, such as
circumcision for males, and following all 613 commandments of the
Torah. When he poses "faith" against "works of the law," he is
therefore posing a faithfulness which follows Christ to the cross
in transcending human practice of religion. The problem all along
with human religious practice is that it, too, has been enslaved
under the powers of sin that divide us, working against God's
original intentions for Creation to be in harmony. Paul in Romans
3:19-26 is thus posing the cross as an event which transcends
human religious practice to become the source of the unification
of all things against a decay under the powers that separate us
(Romans 8:18-39).

Louis Martyn in his Galatians
is again helpful. He refers to the cross event as "apocalypse,"
God breaking into our human realm and setting a "cosmic antinomy,"
a divine instance of anti-law. In the introduction Martyn
considers the charge of Galatians being anti-Judaic and writes,
"For without exception, in the passages listed, as in others, the
ruling polarity is not that of Christianity versus Judaism, church
versus synagogue. As we will see repeatedly, that ruling polarity
is rather the cosmic antinomy of God’s apocalyptic act in Christ
versus religion, and thus the gospel versus religious tradition"
(p. 37). In other words, the Reformation was off-track to the
extent that it used Paul's message as one of Christian grace
versus Jewish works in its own attack on Roman religion,
unwittingly reinforcing anti-Judaism. Martyn is posing to us that
Paul's view of the Christ event is that it is supposed to carry us
beyond all religion, precisely to the extent that religion has
been oppositional -- i.e., part of the problem, not the solution.
Martyn writes,

With the advent of Christ, then, the antinomy between
apocalypse and religion has been enacted by God once for all.
Moreover, this antinomy is central to the way in which Paul does
theology in Galatians, not least in connection with one of its
major themes, rectification. As the antidote to what is wrong in
the world does not lie in religion — religion being one of the
major components of the wrong — so the point of departure from
which there can be movement to set things right cannot be found in
religion; as though, provided with a good religious foundation for
a good religious ladder, one could ascend from the wrong to the
right. Things are the other way around. God has elected to invade
the realm of wrong — “the present evil age” (1:4) — by sending his
Son and the Spirit of his Son into it from outside it. This
apocalyptic invasion thus shows that to take the Sinaitic Law to
the Gentiles — as the Teachers are doing — is to engage in a
mission that is marked at its center by the impotence of religion.

We sense, then, the reason for Paul’s certainty that neither
Christ nor Abraham is a religious figure, but we also see that, in
Paul’s view, the antinomy between apocalypse and religion
militates against the emergence of religion within the
church. And for that reason the church is not a new religion set
over against the old religion, Judaism. (p. 39)

In short, Martyn confirms what we are saying about Paul meaning
"religion" when speaking about the "law" -- no where more clearly
than in describing the effect of Gentiles giving in to the
Teacher:

When Gentiles turn to the observance of the Sinaitic Law
after having been baptized into Christ, Paul says that they
embrace a form of religion that is for them indistinguishable from
the pagan religion into which they were born! For this step
removes them from Christ (4:8-11; 5:4). Quite specifically, then,
for Gentiles Law observance is nothing other than a religion — as
opposed to God’s apocalypse in Christ — and therefore enslaving.
(p. 39)

To better convey what Paul meant, as a pre-modern person without
the secular separation of law from religion, by ho nomos
and ergon nomos, I recommend translating these terms as
"religion" and "religious practice."

3. Vs 22: "the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ
for all who believe." This is a key instance in which wording from
St. Paul is translated as "faith in Jesus Christ," a good
Protestant rendering that emphasizes our having faith in Christ.
But the most reliable writings of Paul never use the most common
Greek word for "in" (en). Eph 1:15 and Col 1:4 use the
preposition en for "faith in Christ," but the Pauline
authorship is contested. Most often in the uncontested letters of
Paul, he uses a genitive construction pisteos 'Iēsou Christou
(e.g., Romans 3:22, 26; Gal 2:16, 3:22; Phil 3:9), which can be
translated either as "faith of Jesus Christ" or "faith in Jesus
Christ." The former is the more typical way to translate a
genitive construction, but the latter is the way that all modern
translators choose to translate this particular one. A similarly
structured genitive construction is used by Paul with regards to
Abraham in Romans 4:16 and to the gospel in Phil 1:27, and the
translators switch back to the usual way: "faith of Abraham" and
"faith of the gospel." (It wouldn't make sense to say "faith in
Abraham"!)

This righteousness, this world-righting covenant
faithfulness, has been revealed “through the faithfulness of Jesus
the Messiah.” Though the phrase could mean “through faith in Jesus
the Messiah,” the entire argument of the section strongly suggests
that it is Jesus’ own pistis that is spoken of and that
the word here means “faithfulness,” not “faith” (see the NRSV note
and the secondary literature referred to in the Overview). This is
not to say that Jesus himself was “justified by faith.” Nor does
Paul envisage him, as does Hebrews, as the “pioneer” of Christian
faith, the first one to believe in the way that Christians now
believe (Heb 12:1-3). Nor is his “faith” a kind of meritorious
work, an “active obedience” to be then accredited to those who
belong to him. To be sure, Paul would have agreed that Jesus
believed in the one he called Abba, Father, and that this faith
sustained him in total obedience; but this is not the point he is
making here. The point here is that Jesus has offered to God, at
last, the faithfulness Israel had denied (3:2-3).

A further reason why pistis 'Iēsou Christou here is
likely to refer to Jesus’ own faithfulness is that, if taken
instead to refer to the faith Christians have “in” Jesus, the
next phrase (“for all who believe”) becomes almost entirely
redundant, adding only the (admittedly important) “all.” The
train of thought is clearer if we read it as “through the
faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, for the benefit of all who
believe.” This then corresponds closely to the reading suggested
above for 1:17: from God’s faithfulness to answering human
faith. (It is also very close to Gal 3:22, where similar
discussions have taken place.) [p. 470]

4. More needs to be said about pistis, "faith," itself, and
then the very unusual phrase nomos pistis, "law of faith."
First of all, we need to get beyond "faith" primarily in the sense
of inward belief to "faithfulness" as pointing more to the way that
relationships are lived out. So pistis 'Iēsou Christou does
not refer to what Jesus believed about God, or about himself as God,
but rather to the way Jesus lived out his relationship to
God, especially in going to the cross. And our "faith in Jesus"
similarly does not refer so much to what we believe about
Jesus as it does to the relationship we have in following in the way
of Jesus. "Faith" points not so much to belief as it does to faithful
discipleship.

Secondly, in this Pauline context of talking about the Christ event
as transcending religion, I think that pistis points to what
postmodern folks are trying to express with the word "spiritual" --
for instance, when they say, "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual."
Paul with the word pistis is trying to mark out something
that transcends religion as part of the human reality that is
enslaved to the powers of sinful human division and conflict. The
cross is the source of God's unifying powers of love, and pistis
is what connects us, brings us into relationship with, that unifying
power of the cross.

So in my translation below, I translate pistis as
"faithfulness" and nomos pistis as "spiritual faithfulness."

5. The translation of "the righteousness of God" (Gr: dikaiosynē theou) is also
contested these days by Douglas
Campbell, who translates it as "the deliverance of God"
(hence, the title
of his book; see more below). (Campbell, btw, can also be
added to the list of scholars who translate pisteos 'Iesou
Christou as "the faithfulness of Jesus Christ," or even "the
fidelity of Jesus Christ.") As per the discussion above in #1, I
prefer to stay consistent with the dik-root words and
translate this phrase as "the justice of God" -- understanding that
justice in the context of this passage means a saving act from God
which delivers us from the powers of sin and death that
divide us.

6. Vs. 25, hilastērios, "expiation," "sacrifice of
atonement." Commentaries tell us that hilastērios was used
in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew word for "mercy seat," the
central place of the atonement ritual. We then might recall
the well-used teaching tool of rendering atonement as at-one-ment, a
process of making one, of reconciling. In my translation below,
then, I render hilastērios as "source of unification." It
could also easily be "source of reconciliation." In either case, I
want to more directly pose what happens in the cross as the remedy
for the powers of sin and death whose main consequence is division.
These are the powers we read about in the climax to Paul's
proclamation in Romans 8:31-39, powers that condemn and thus
threaten to separate us from the love of God. The law, or
"religion," is every bit as much caught under the effects of these
powers, duped into a role of constantly condemning. The Reformation
has simply given us another version of being duped, another religion
that has been played by the powers of sin to divide us. The cross
alone stands outside religion, even as the One Crucified was
condemned as one cursed by religion, to give us a saving event in
history that becomes the true hilastērios, the true source
of unifying what sin has divided.

7. With all of these exegetical notes in mind, I add the feature of
two voices from Douglas Campbell's The
Deliverance of God. One of Campbell's main theses is
that Paul's Letter to the Romans is an example of First Century
diatribe, in which an opponent's voice, named by Campbell as simply
the Teacher, is represented within the text in dialogue with the
author's argument. One of the first places where the opposing
Teacher's voice is fully heard, according to Campbell, is 1:18-32.
The series of questions and answers in 3:1-7 is actually a dialogue
where Paul is posing questions to the Teacher and the Teacher is
answering. 3:19-26 represents Paul's main statement of his views
answering the forensic language of the Teacher (as opposed to Paul's
main statement of his Gospel in his own language of deliverance in
Romans 5-8), and 3:27-4:3 represents a dialogue where the Teacher
poses questions and Paul answers. (Based on Campbell's work, I offer
my
own 'voicing' on the full passage of Romans 1:1-4:3 here
-- but not with all the elements of my translation of 3:19-28
immediately below.)

Given all these factors, then, I offer my own translation of today's
passage:

St. Paul: 19We know that whatever
religion says, it speaks to those who are under religion, such
that every mouth might be silenced, and the whole world might come
under God's judgment. 20 For “no flesh will be
justified before God” by religious practice, for through religion
comes consciousness of sin. 21 Now, then, apart from
religion, the justice of God has been disclosed, and is attested
by Scripture: 22 the justice of God through the
faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who trust. For there is no
distinction, 23 since all have sinned and fall short
of the glory of God; 24 they are now justified by
God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ
Jesus, 25 whom God intended to be the source of
unification effective through faithfulness in his blood. God did
this to show God’s justice, because in divine forbearance God
granted amnesty for sins previously committed; 26 it
was to prove at the present time that God’s justice is itself just
in the very act of declaring everyone just by the faithfulness of
Jesus.

Teacher: 27 Then what becomes of boasting?

St. Paul: It is excluded.

Teacher: By what religious practice?

St. Paul: By none, but rather by a new spiritual
faithfulness. 28 For we hold that a person is
justified by a spiritual faithfulness beyond previous religious
practice.

The bottom line of my translation supports very much what Brian
McLaren is doing in his book Why
Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?:
Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World. McLaren
challenges Christians to examine the way in which our Christian
identity is hostile to non-Christians. In that way it plays out the
same as any other typical religion. And so he asks us if Jesus
didn't in fact come to transform the way we do religion so that our
Christian identity is hospitable to others rather than hostile. In
short, shouldn't religion ultimately be that which unites us rather
than just another thing human which divides us? This, I believe, is
exactly what is behind the common self-expression today, "I'm not
religious, but I'm spiritual." This modern confession intuits a
relationship between all religion as we know it as playing a
significant role in human division and conflict. And it hopes for
something else that truly has the power to unite us, a spiritual
practice that brings us into communion with the God who is the
source of all oneness.

In offering this translation of Romans 3:19-28, I believe that this
is exactly what Paul is trying to lay out for us, with a Gospel
whose source is the faithfulness of Jesus Christ in going to the
cross. The cross is the event in history that transcends religion
(or "the law") so that now even religion can be redeemed --
reformed! And so the so-called Reformation which we celebrate this
day never yet happened according to this understanding of Paul! And
it will not happen until we undertake what McLaren begins to lay out
for us in his book, namely, a Re-forming of Christian identity from
top to bottom that is hospitable to others rather than hostile. It
will not happen until we properly understand Paul in Romans to be
arguing for the cross as an apocalyptic event that transcends
religion, and all of human culture, as the in-breaking power of
God's love to unify and heal what our sinfulness divides and
destroys. (For more on "apocalyptic," especially as something beyond
the typical Protestant "forensic" orientation, see my exposition
below of J. Louis Martyn's work in his commentary on Galatians.)

Resources

1. Douglas Campbell, The
Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of
Justification in Paul (see my review on the Amazon.com
page). This is now the definitive book that must be contended with
regarding any crucial interpretations of Romans. Campbell has four
chapters, roughly 135 pages (601-735), covering Romans 3:21-31, as
the heart of his argument that it is time for heirs of the
Reformation to give up their Justification theology. Chapter 17,
"The Deliverance of God, and Its Rhetorical Implications," argues
that dikaiosynē in Paul
means liberation, deliverance, rescue, rather than a forensic
imputation of rightness or justification. Paul's Gospel is about
creation being delivered from the powers of sin and death, powers
that work against harmony, through an unconditionally gracious
rescue operation by God's faithful Messiah -- instead of an
imputation of "justified" graciously stamped on a "totally
depraved" humanity. The latter Justification theology either
devolves into a conditional grace based on the faith of the
believer, instead of being based on the fidelity of the Messiah to
his rescue mission, or it ends up wandering down the Calvinist
path of double predestination, conditioned on God's election of
some but not others. (Luther seemingly chose the path of
mysticism, refusing to go down the path of double predestination
due to the mystery of
God's grace. Campbell instead chooses the Luther who centers his
theology on a God who delivers the ungodly [Rom 4:5; 5:6] -- in
other words, all of humanity -- as the Luther of unconditional
grace. The other Luther reads Romans 1-3 in a flawed way that
wanders down the path of conditional grace -- short of double
predestination.) Either way, the primary interpretations of
Justification theology mean a conditional grace instead of the
unconditional grace that the Reformation thought it stood
for.

2. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians
(Anchor Bible Series). If Campbell is correct that Paul is arguing
against the same teachers in Rome as in Galatia, then Martyn's
groundbreaking commentary on Galatians is a valuable resource to
understanding Romans. Martyn helps us to understand Paul's
relationship with the Teacher, both agreements and disagreements.
He argues that Paul and the Teacher are together on emphasizing
God's action in Jesus Christ through the cross and resurrection as
an apocalyptic event, an in-breaking of God's saving action into
our sinful human reality. The differences between Paul and the
Teacher don't appear until the situation of mission to Gentiles --
when the difference appears of the Teacher assuming that converts
must convert religions, becoming Jewish, and Paul doesn't. It
becomes more clear, then, that the Teacher's position is one that
Martyn calls forensic apocalypse, a salvific act conceived in
terms of the law -- a justification that is imputed, to use the
Reformation language. Whereas for Paul the cross and resurrection
reveal what Martyn calls a cosmic apocalypse: God acting to save
us from powers of sin and death that enslave all that is human,
including the law, including religion.

Martyn's differentiation between forensic apocalypse and cosmic
apocalypse has implications for Reformation theology that can't be
overstated in their importance. For hasn't the Reformation largely
ended up essentially taking the position of the Teacher instead of
Paul?! The Lutheranism that I've grown up with stresses a
justification that is imputed only -- namely, forensic. It has
seen Paul vs. the Teacher in its own rendering of faith vs. works,
that the Teacher taught a Gospel based on works in the sense of
outward deeds. The Reformation thus ultimately framed the
difference in terms of inward belief vs. outward deeds.

But Martyn argues that this is based on a misunderstanding of
both Paul and the Teacher whose difference must be parsed in terms
of apocalypse, namely, in terms of how far-reaching God's saving
act in Jesus Christ goes. Protestantism, in misunderstanding
Paul's use of the key terms, has settled precisely for the
Teacher's apocalypse as forensic only, an imputed righteousness
that gets us to heaven after we die but is limited when it comes
to talking about sanctification in this life. According to Martyn,
Paul's cosmic apocalypse, then, and Paul's use of faith
vs. works language, is not about our inward belief vs. outward
deeds. It is about Christ's faithfulness -- a relationship to God
that is more immediate than what religious practice has
facilitated -- in bringing about a cosmic rescue from the powers
of sin and death that even rescues "works" itself -- "works" being
shorthand for Paul's longer "works of the law" which is really
about religious practice. In other words, God's cosmic salvation
from the powers of sin even includes religion.

To get at this insight we have to somehow get outside the embrace
of religion, which is why Paul always goes back to Abraham. For
him Abraham represents a point before religion, the law, when
salvation begins simply as a relationship with God, a
faithfulness, "faith." Thus, Paul's argument against the Teacher
is not about inward belief vs. outward deeds. It is about whether
one has to convert religions to access this salvation because it
is a salvation that includes all religions, even Paul's own Jewish
religion. "Faith" represents a relation with God that is more
immediate than what religious practice, "works," has been able to
accomplish. The Christ event represents a going outside of
religion, taking upon itself the curse of religion, to reconnect
us to God in a way that saves us from the cosmic powers of sin and
death that have enslaved even religion.

In short, the Reformation has completely missed the boat and
simply given us another version of the deadly, divisive sinfulness
that thwarts God's original intention of harmony and oneness for
the cosmos. It divides us on the basis of inward belief vs.
outward deeds and then eternalizes that difference into the
ultimate division of heaven and hell. According to this
anti-Gospel, only the correct inward beliefs, about things like
Jesus' divinity, gets one into heaven; and salvation has nothing
to do with outward deeds. In short, this Protestant version of the
Gospel is every bit as forensic as the Teacher's Gospel. And so it
falls into its own version of thwarting God's cosmic intentions of
unifying the cosmos in the face of its sinful divisions. It is an
anti-Gospel, another religion that divides, with the same deadly
consequences as other religious practices before it. (Check its
historical record in this regard!!) According to Paul's argument
against the Teacher, we don't need another version of religious
practice that simply repeats the sin on another basis. We need a
reconciled relationship to God based on a faithfulness that
transcends religion and thus has a potential to save even our
religion.

In other words, it is time for the Reformation to finally take
place! Not a pseudo-Reformation that leads us into another
anti-Gospel, another means to divide us. It is time for us to
embrace the faithful spirituality enabled by Jesus Christ and the
continuing work of the Holy Spirit so that we finally begin to
live into God's intended harmony for the cosmos. (As mentioned
above, we need to precisely take on the task which Brian
McLaren begins to lay out for us in Why
Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?.)

5. James Alison, The
Joy of Being Wrong, p. 118, as an example of God's
forgiving love revealed to us the resurrection; p. 126, 135, in
elaborating the Pauline witness and the transformation of God's
wrath; p. 155, in elaborating the Pauline understanding of desire;
p. 181, in commenting on the universality of sin.

6. Robin Meyers, The Underground Church.

Reflections and Questions

1. In 2012 the central task in preparation for preaching
was work on the above translation. Then came the main image to
use: a baseball locker room covered in plastic for the champagne
celebration but not getting used because the game to eliminate the
other team is lost. (My beloved Detroit Tigers were on the verge
of being eliminated in the World Series.) Or for the election
season: the image of gathering on Election Night to celebrate with
friends but your candidate loses. This is how I would characterize
our Reformation Day celebrations for me these days, because I see
the victory that was supposed to happen as not yet having
happened. When we correctly understand what Paul was saying in
Romans (and elsewhere), then Reformation cannot be about other
ways of dividing us as human beings -- for example, into those who
follow true religion vs. those who follow false religion, with
one's ultimate fate in the afterlife hanging in balance.
Reformation needs to be about a faithful following of Jesus in the
way of healing our divisions. This way can still be rejected and
thus be a means of division. But at least we need to get to the
point of understanding the Gospel as the invitation to be healed
of our divisions. Christ came and let himself be pushed outside
the bounds of all religion, cursed to death by them, in order that
he might in the resurrection become the source of reconciliation.
As Louis Martyn maintains, the "cosmic apocalypse" of the
cross is not the beginning of a new religion. It is a healing
reconciliation with the God whose Oneness can make us One. As Paul
shockingly puts it in Ephesians 2:15, "Christ has abolished the
law [recall my translation above as "religion"] with its
commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one
new humanity in place of the two." How can we have missed the
point when it is stated so clearly and boldly?

The resulting sermon is titled "Celebrating the Victory of Faith."
I also wrote a newsletter column the day that might be titled "Fulfilling
the Reformation." Together they might be considered as a
manifesto of where I hope the church to be headed. If I was
running for bishop in the ELCA, they pretty well describe my
vision for the Reformation church.

2. I believe (see "My
Core
Convictions," IV.2) that translating pisteos Christou
only in its objective form is a mistranslation of Paul which has
led to a new works righteousness of Protestantism, based
on the work of our believing: my act of believing becomes
the only work that counts for salvation. On the contrary, I think
that Paul is saying in this passage that righteousness comes from
neither what we do or what we believe (which is, after all, still
something we do). Righteousness comes solely through Jesus Christ,
both from what he did and from the relationship with God which he
faithfully lived out. I think that Paul's short-hand way of saying
this is pisteos 'Iesou Christou, "the faith of Jesus
Christ." When we translate this phrase as "faith in Christ" it too
easily becomes a matter of our being saved by virtue of what we
believe. When we translate it as "the faith of Christ" the
emphasis more properly remains on Christ, instead of on us. What
saves us is Christ's faith, which is commuted to us through the
Holy Spirit so that his faith might live in us. It is his
faith living in us that saves us and makes a new creation.
Christ's faith living in us definitively affects both our doing
and believing.

3. Mimetic theory accounts for this difference in interpretations
through its Trinitarian pattern of relationships. Modern, romantic
theories of relations see only the subject-object split. Personal
states of being, such as beliefs, are thus simply a matter of each
person's control in relationship to the object. We either believe
in Christ, for example, or we don't. Strictly personal choice.

Mimetic theory, on the other hand, sees personal states of being,
such as desire or belief, in terms of the triangle of
relationships between the triad of: subject -- model/rival --
object. We come by states of being such as belief via the Other.
So the question is not simply a matter of choosing between
beliefs; it also involves being in relationship with the right
model of belief. For St. Paul this meant faith in Christ, i.e.,
being in relationship with the right model for one's whole life,
for one's very being. The genitive construction pisteos
Christou can thus be interpreted, under the light of mimetic
theory, in both the objective and subjective modes at the same
time. Christ can be both our model for faith and the object of our
faith at the same time. With the dualistic interpretation of
subject-object, the depth of relationship is lost, and it simply
becomes a matter of my believing (subject) in Christ (object). I
no longer fit Christ's faith into the web of relationships as the
essential key to my being able to come to faith in Christ in the
first place.

This is what has happened, I think, to the Christian faith,
especially in its Protestant variety (ironic, then, that this
passage is a centerpiece for Reformation Day). It has lost its
depth and breadth and become, like everything in the modern world,
simply a matter of personal choice. My believing in Christ becomes
its own form of works righteousness, something I must do to earn
righteousness from God. Mimetic theory can provide the corrective
to our understanding of faith, I think, just as its has done with
desire.

Themes around atonement and the "wrath of God" were tied together
by one of my favorite stories, Walter Wangerin, Jr.’s
story about his son stealing comic books (see The Manger is
Empty, chapter 17, “Matthew, Seven, Eight, and Nine”). It is
the story of a three year drama of trying to get his son Matthew
to stop stealing comic books -- to which the final resort had been
a spanking, a measure so drastic for Wangerin that he had needed
to leave the room and cry. Matthew didn't cry; he cried. Matthew
did finally stop stealing from that day onward, but it wasn't
because of the law. Here's Wangerin's conclusion to the story that
so perfectly fits this day of marveling at God's righteousness
revealed as mercy instead of the law:

What wasn’t true, however, was how I thought the change
had occurred in my son. I thought it was the spanking. I thought
the law had done it.

The law can do many things, of course. It can frighten a child
till his eyes go wide. It can restrain him and blame him and
shame him, surely. But it cannot change him. So it was with
Israel. So it is with all the people of God. So it was with
Matthew. Mercy alone transfigures the human heart -- mercy,
which takes a human face.

For this is the final truth of my story:

Years after that spanking, Matthew and his mother were driving
home from the shopping center. They were discussing things that
had happened in the past. The topic of comic books came up. They
talked of how he used to steal them, and of how long the
practice continued.

Matthew said, “But you know, Mom, I haven’t stolen comic books
for a long, long time.”

His mother said, “I know.” She drew the word out for gratitude:
“I knoooow.”

Matthew mused a moment, then said, “Do you know why I stopped
the stealing?”

“Sure,” said his mother. “Because Dad spanked you.”

“No, Mom,” said Matthew, my son, the child of my heart. He
shook his head at his mother’s mistake. “No,” he said, “but
because Dad cried.”

Hereafter, let every accuser of my son reckon with the mercy of
God, and fall into a heap, and fail. For love accomplished what
the law could not, and tears are more powerful than Sinai. Even
the Prince of Accusers shall bring no charge against my son that
the Final judge shall not dismiss. Satan, you are defeated! My
God has loved my Matthew.

5. Often times, our version of faith means believing the right
things about God, in other words, having correct theology. I
recall my own Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod roots and
subsequently times at table with LC-MS colleagues, whose brand of
Lutheran fundamentalism make what I consider the Protestant brand
of works righteousness patently obvious to me. They are not
supposed to even pray with fellow Christians unless their theology
is deemed pure (i.e., clean as opposed to unclean, sacred as
opposed to profane, in other words, the same old religion of the
Sacred). Correct theology may not as obviously be a “good work” we
have to do, but we shouldn’t let ourselves be fooled by that. And
correct theology doesn’t even meet any practical needs of
salvation -- unless it is that brand of salvation I’ve come to
reject, that God punishes to eternal damnation those who don’t
believe in Jesus Christ. God in Jesus Christ is saving us from our
violence, not divine violence. And, meanwhile, correct theology
doesn’t feed a starving person. In my book, it is a pale, hideous
form of “good work” that often ends up distracting us from doing
the truly good work of serving the least of our brothers and
sisters. The latter are the good works which are properly fruits
of the righteousness graciously given us through Jesus Christ.

Is there a role for correct theology? Yes! If it helps lead us
into a relationship with the nonviolent, loving God of Jesus
Christ. Or, in the case of René Girard, it was correct,
evangelical anthropology that helped lead him into that
relationship -- though it wasn’t that alone. See an account of his
conversion in The Girard
Reader, pp. 283ff.

6. The Philippians 3 text (which appears in
the Year A lectionary shortly before Reformation Day, Proper
22A) contains what I think is the most obvious instance of
incorrectly translating pisteos Christou. Consider 3:8-11:

More than that, I regard everything as loss because of
the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake
I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as
rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not
having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one
that comes through faith in Christ (pisteos Christou), the
righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and
the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by
becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the
resurrection from the dead.

Doesn't it make more sense in verse nine to translate it as the
"faith of Christ"? That's why St. Paul wants to know Christ, his
death and resurrection, and wants Christ to live in him; so that he
can live by Christ's faith, which is the only thing that can truly
make us righteous.

7. Another passage that has connected for me with Reformation
Sunday during Year A has been Matthew's parable of the Vineyard
Growers (see Proper
20A). Here's a parable from Jesus where grace and work are
seamlessly woven together. We can hardly imagine a more gracious
ending: those who work the last couple hours of the day are paid
the same life-sustaining daily wage as those who worked the whole
day. It is a picture so gracious that it scandalizes us. But
notice just as prominently the theme of a call to work. Jesus
begins the parable: "For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner
who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his
vineyard." The kingdom of heaven is a call to work! And the
parable never mentions the vineyard owner needing more
laborers. When he goes out into the marketplace throughout the day
to hire more workers, the text doesn't tell us about his
need for more workers. No, it tells us about the worker's need
to work; he notices their idleness:

And about five o'clock he went out and found others
standing around; and he said to them, "Why are you standing here
idle all day?" They said to him, "Because no one has hired us." He
said to them, "You also go into the vineyard."

The Creator's call for us to share in the work of creation is itself
the beginning of grace. And then, when we set up our own work,
following the desires of one another rather than of God, God meets
us with the grace of Jesus Christ and his faith to finally follow
the call which we have largely ignored or distorted into our own
work. Through the faithful work of Jesus Christ, we finally have the
power to begin doing God's work, which we have been called to do
since the breaking of the new day. In the grace of forgiveness, we
realize that we are all workers hired late in the day, and
that Christ was the only one who truly did God's work from the
beginning. When, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we receive
Christ's faith, we are empowered to do his same work, which is the
work we have been called to do all along.

1. John 8 is a crucial Girardian text, especially vs. 44: "You
are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's
desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand
in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he
speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the
father of lies." This one verse indicates a distorted, Satanic
desire that has issued in murder since the beginning of (human)
time. One will find that almost every Girardian book that deals
with scripture will reference this passage in the context of the
Johannine insight into (to use Robert Hamerton-Kelly's phrase) the
Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism. So beginning with René
Girard himself: Things
Hidden, p. 161; The Scapegoat, p.
196. In his most recent book, I
See Satan Fall Like Lightning, gives another expansive
reading of this text which I give as an excerpt here, pp.
38-43
of chapter three on "Satan."

2. James Alison, Faith
Beyond Resentment; the most recent, and most
expansive, reading yet of John 8 is offered as chapter 3, "Jesus'
Fraternal Relocation of God," pp. 56-85. I think it stands up
there with Alison's reading of John 9 as groundbreaking theology.
Link to an excerpt of this
chapter on John 8.

6. In March of 2001, I was at a conference with a presentation on
the Historical Jesus Movement, and John 8 actually came up as an
obvious example of anti-Semitism in the Gospels. I wrote a
response, which is posted on this website as "A
Girardian Take on the Historical Jesus Movement."

7. James Alison, Raising
Abel, pp. 63-65; The
Joy of Being Wrong, pp. 119-125. Particularly
poignant, I think, is Alison's reading of John 8 in his section in
RA entitled "Jesus' Creation of Divine Paternity for Us"
(pp. 63-65). It also provides a good follow-up to what was
emphasized last week in Year A about our rootedness in death; or
to the discussion of being God's children in recent weeks for Year
B. Another way of putting the matter is by realizing our paternity
in a murderous Satan as opposed to the God life. The question
which Alison poses in this section is: of which god are we
children? The idolatrous gods of death, represented by the devil,
or the true God of Jesus Christ, the God of life? Alison writes:

If we begin with a general notion of God, and understand
that it so happened that Jesus called this God his Father, then we
would have an image of someone who was insisting, rather
pretentiously, that he had a special relationship with someone who
is, in principle, equally accessible to all. This makes him rather
like teacher's pet: someone rather despicable in the eyes of
everyone else. Well, this is the inverse of what happens in the
way in which Jesus speaks of "my Father," and says things like,
"no one comes to the Father but by me" (Jn 14:6).

Jesus starts from a completely different position: that there
is no general notion of God that is in principle accessible to
all, but that the available notions of God are pretty much
false, and not only false, but also fatal. This position is
amply illustrated in his discussion with some Jews who had
believed in him in John 8, where he compares two different sorts
of father: his Father and the father of his interlocutors. These
notions of paternity are radically and incompatibly different:
one notion is that of a father who, however unblemished his
pedigree seems to be, in practice leads his children to lying
and killing. Jesus links this father to the murder of Abel by
Cain (Jn 8:44). We might call him the father of the founding
murder; traditionally he is known as the devil, and the devil
understood not as a mythical figure, red, with horns like the
Greek god Pan, with a trident in his hand "all the better to
roast you with," but that much more worrying figure, a satanized
god, someone who seems to be God but is in fact an obstacle, an
accusation, the whisperer behind the lynch. Jesus is saying, in
reality, to his interlocutors: the God who has been revealing
himself to Israel during all this time is not the one
who you say; your interpretation and use of God turn him into
Satan; only my interpretation of him is faithful to who God
truly is.

Jesus affirms that his Father is unknown and impossible to
know except through him, and not because he's being
pretentious, or teacher's pet, but because the secret of that
satanized god is death: while people are still formed by a world
which begins and ends in death they have no way of knowing a God
who has nothing to do with death. Only someone who does not know
death can begin to make accessible who that God is. So Jesus, at
the same time as he makes possible belief in the utter
vivaciousness of God, also creates the possibility of
God's paternity among human beings. Before Jesus' self-giving it
was effectively impossible that we be children of the Father,
that is, moved from within by one who is self-giving love,
because we were locked in to death. The possibility of coming to
be children came about not through some general decree of
adoption, but through a creative act that demanded a mise-en-scène,
a particular human acting out.

I want to emphasize this once more: Jesus didn't come to tell
us that God is our Father. That is excessively banal. He came to
create the possibility that God in fact be our Father, or
rather, that we should really become God's children, which is,
in every case, something strictly impossible for humans to be
naturally, since we are all enclosed in a mistaken
identification of God with an ambiguous or satanic figure. This
is what John understands when he talks of "the world," "the
prince of this world" and so on. He is talking about life under
the paternity of the murderous lie. If you read Jn 15:18-16:4 in
this light, it may make more sense than before: "the hour is
coming when whoever kills you will think that they are offering
a service to God, and this they will do because they have not
known the Father nor me" (Jn 16:2-3). There we have the two
different sorts of paternity set out with absolute clarity: the
paternity which kills and persecutes so as to serve "god," and
the paternity which is shown in the self-giving in the midst of
violence as a witness to the complete vivaciousness of the God
who knows not death.

Now, this puts into question any universal notion of God, with
respect to whom we can agree in polite conversations, with
little phrases like: "after all, we're all God's children." Of
which god are we children? This can be deduced from our
practical behavior: the revelation of God's complete aliveness
is the same thing as the making possible the practical living
out of a way of bearing witness to that vivacity, the style of
life of a witness, or, in Greek, a martyr, a style of life that
is always prepared to run the risk of being expelled rather than
participating in any human solidarity in expulsion. It seems
important to emphasize this since, if we don't, we may have too
familiar and domesticated a notion of God, which will make it
difficult for us to wake up to the strangeness of the fact that
it needed someone to die to make it possible for us to
understand how different our real Father and Creator is. There
is no access to him except from within that process of
self-giving. (pp. 63-65)

8. Isn't the matter of truth first and foremost a matter of the true
God? Human anthropology has fallen into an idolatry of gods of
violence. In Jesus Christ we finally meet a creator God of love, a
God who is light, and in whom there is no darkness at all.
Philosophically, St. John posed this as the Logos of Love vs. the
Logos of Violence. See René Girard's brilliant chapter "The
Logos of Heraclitus and the Logos of John" (Things Hidden, Book II,
Chapter 4), and/or the excerpt from this chapter in the
essay on this website "René
Girard:
the
Anthropology
of
the
Cross as Alternative to Post-Modern Literary Criticism" (a
reworking of "Girardian
Anthropology in a Nutshell") -- in which Girard says, for
example, "The Johannine Logos discloses the truth of violence by
having itself expelled.... The Logos of love puts up no resistance;
it always allows itself to be expelled by the Logos of violence."

Reflections and Questions

1. We’ve already mentioned the Greek word for “truth,” aleitheia,
meaning literally, “stop forgetting.” Also important is the Hebrew
word often translated as “truth,” emet. My Bibleworks computer
program (highly recommended!) helps me discover that “truth” is no
less than the fourth meaning of emet. Placing the
pointer/cursor over the word emet, it instantly gives me
the following from Whittaker’s Revised BDB Lexicon, p. 54:

In other words, the Hebrew word for “truth” should come as no
surprise from a covenant people in relationship to the Creator-God
of the universe. Truth is a reliability of covenant relationship. It
is faithfulness. In English, we sometimes say things like, “He is
true to his wife,” meaning faithful. But this has become a rare
usage of “true.”

2. Then again, perhaps this Hebrew meaning of “truth” can help
revitalize our Western use of “faith.” Our reflections on Romans 3
lamented our impoverished sense of faith. Our sense of
faith has become more like our sense of truth: faith is the
‘science’ of believing the right things about God, of having a
correct theology. What if it were the other way around, that we
let the Hebrew meaning of truth revitalize our sense of faith? Or
the Hebrew sense of faithfulness revitalize our sense of truth?

3. One of my favorite stories about truth is the 1981 movie “Absence of Malice.”
A newspaper reporter (Sally Field as "Megan") poses her sense of
truth against a wrongly implicated man (Paul Newman as "Michael")
whose sense of truth has more to do with faithfulness in
relationships. Megan and Michael subsequently fall into a romantic
relationship that breaks off again when Megan goes back to being a
reporter with Michael, and the have the following conversation:

Michael: You wanna know the truth? O.K., you wanna ask
me as a person, I’ll tell you. You ask me as a reporter, I’ve got
no comment.

Megan: That’s not fair!

Michael: Not fair to who? Wait a minute. You don’t write the
truth. You write what people say. You overhear. You eavesdrop. You
don’t come across truth that easy. Maybe it’s just what you think,
what you feel. I don’t need your goddam newspaper to decide what
they’re gonna do with me, or who I am.

Megan: Then you tell me: Who are you?

Michael: You mean you’re not sure yet?

Michael's sense of truth is more in the sense of faithfulness in a
relationship, and Megan still doesn't trust him, so he breaks things
off. After Michael sets up those investigating him for a big fall
(the lead investigator gets fired), Megan talks to the reporter who
writes the story and has to interview Megan because she had a
relationship with Michael. In reading what she has written about the
relationship, the reporter asks, "Is that true?" Megan responds,
"No, but it's accurate." Megan has finally understood the difference
between truth as accuracy and truth as faithfulness in a
relationship.

Another window into these differing senses of truth is the Hebrew
word emet, which sometimes is translated as "truth," but
just as often is translated as "faithfulness." In light of our
interpretation of today's Second Reading, one might say that the
Greek word pistis is a good translation for the Hebrew word
emet -- and then alētheia in John's Greek text.
Truth, as faithfulness, is what sets us free.

4. How has the scientific experience of truth been so productive
when bracketing out God? And how is the scientific experience of
truth related to truth as faithfulness in relationships? Girard
has suggested a connection in one his best quotable quotes:

The invention of science is not the reason that there
are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer
witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The
scientific spirit, like the spirit of enterprise in an economy, is
a by-product of the profound action of the Gospel text. The modern
Western world has forgotten the revelation in favor of its
by-products, making them weapons and instruments of power.... (The Scapegoat, pp.
204-205)

Faithfulness to persons, a reluctance to do violence against them,
motivated us to find different kinds of explanation. The history
behind Girard’s comment is that our faithfulness to persons finally
motivated us to stop blaming them -- as, for example, witches -- and
to look for other causes of the evils to befall us. Before science
(and even after!), it was commonplace to find a personal cause
behind the bad things that happen to us. If a drought hit a New
England town in the early seventeenth century, they might have been
likely to blame a witch. When faithfulness to such persons finally
got in the way of continuing such violence, we began seeking and
finding impersonal kinds of causes. This, conjectures Girard, is the
impetus behind the development of modern Western science.

And the impetus behind such faithfulness to persons is the Good
News story of Jesus Christ, who himself became one of those blamed
and sacrificed -- only to have God, in the ultimate
(eschatologically speaking) act of faithfulness, raise him from
the dead. To those to whom he appeared as the Risen Lord, a new
impulse, a Holy Spirit, was let loose into the world which
empowers disciples to get behind that supposedly righteous
sacrifice and find a different way to Holy Communion, a different
way to staying together faithfully in community without having to
resort to violent expulsion. (See also the sermon “Healing,
Pt.
III:
‘Peace
Beyond
Our
Fear and Hope Beyond Our Sorrow.’”)

We haven’t even begun to ponder the second part of the quote from
Girard, concerning the effects on science of having forgotten the
spirit behind its existence. I’ll leave the reader to ponder that
weighty question.

5. In #8 under “Resources” above, we raised the question, “Isn't
the matter of truth first and foremost a matter of the true God?”
On Reformation Sunday that is still the question for me as I yearn
for a Reformation in the church that answers that question in a
most decisive way. Luther tried to show us a God of mercy in Jesus
Christ, as opposed to our idolatrous god of wrath (e.g., the one
still plaguing us in substitutionary doctrines of atonement; link
to "The
Anthropology
of René Girard and Traditional Doctrines of Atonement"). And
he did so in facing the kind of violence from the church we truly
need to come to see and understand. Yet somehow we still largely
missed it. We have missed the crucial choice between our gods of
violence and the God of love in Jesus Christ. We continue to use
our god of violence to justify our doing violence. We have
continued to miss the fact that God in Christ is saving us
from our violence, to the extent that we still make the
faith about Jesus saving us from God’s ultimate violence
of a place we call hell, that holding tank for eternal divine
punishment.

That is why I am so unabashedly evangelical in these pages about
the opportunity I believe we have in finally having an evangelical
anthropology to go with our attempts at evangelical theology. It
is the key to at long last experiencing Reformation. Girard’s work
can help lead us into a more focused understanding and faith
around what I think should be a matter of ultimate concern: human
violence, and its cause in fallen human desire. Since the
foundation of our worlds, we have fallen into idolatries that aid
us in veiling our full responsibility for violence. We heap the
mimetic violence of our communities onto our scapegoats, all with
sacred justification.

Violence is the quintessential matter of life and death. It is
what forever threatens to break apart human community such that we
fail to survive. God in Jesus Christ comes into this world to
invite us into the realm of the only ultimately victorious power
over that of human violence: the faithfulness of an
unconditionally loving and forgiving Creator-God.